Bristol Palin, Bullying Victim? Please.

Bristol Palin, exemplar of so-called “traditional families” that she is, just couldn’t let President Obama’s historic endorsement of marriage equality pass by last week without throwing in her two cents. (If you missed this important development in this historic story, reading this handy post from Evan will catch you right up.) Basically, Bristol Palin turned the story around into one about how she, her mother, and other “Christian female” presidential candidates are, in fact, the victims of the current President’s social conscience. His daughters’ perspectives helped him evolve on marriage, but when “Christian women” run for President, they’re picked apart about the degree on which they rely on their spouses. As an example, Bristol cites Michele Bachmann being asked at a debate about whether, as president, she would “submit” to her husband Marcus. (Palin writes as though the question was just plucked out of thin air by a mean-spirited, anti-Christian debate moderator rather than a logical follow-up to remarks Rep. Bachmann made herself when running for office in Minnesota in 2006.) And of course, there’s also her mother, the perpetually victimized Sarah Palin, who her daughter believes was the target of unjust questions about the role her father — Gov. Palin’s husband, Todd — played in decision making (despite the fact that Todd Palin was widely knownto be one of Sarah’s closest advisors).

Bristol also hauled out two thoroughly debunked right-wing talking points about marriage — first, that it’s been a static and unchanging institution for “thousands of years,” and second, that “in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home” (when in reality, study after study after study shows that claim to be patently false).

As it turns out, a lot of people had a lot to say about Bristol Palin’s factually inaccurate, anti-Obama, anti-gay blog post. Some were supportive, some opposed; some were well-reasoned and calm, others were vicious and mean-spirited. In response, Bristol came out with another post on Monday where, in vintage Palin fashion, she failed to address any of the legitimate arguments made by her critics, bashed “Hollywood-type sheeple” for their allegedly uniform intolerance for people with anti-abortion and anti-gay views (apparently I missed the memo that a stint on Dancing with the Stars qualifies one as a Hollywood insider these days…), and said that she felt “[hated] in the name of love” and “[bullied] in the name of tolerance.” She then attempted to imply that in voicing her belief in marriage discrimination, she was speaking for her generation — my generation, the Millennials, who support marriage equality by a landslide margin of 22 percent. Yeah, no.